most modern
hard wired radios offer “dual watch” monitoring 9 and 16 simultaneously. I generally monitor in scan mode.
Where you on
Channel 69 when you called? I don’t know why they were monitoring Channel 69. It’s not monitored, nor is it supposed to be monitored, by the Coast Guard. They don’t bark unless someone is where they aren’t supposed to be on the dial. I wasn’t there, but I’m venturing to guess that it’d be a more likely scenario that it was a mariner pulling a prank. If it was the CG, that watch stander received some bad training.
What they said
is standard proceedure here on the West Coast, but there’s nothing illegal about what you did. Seems a lot of confusion over VHF protocal. I it hard to believe that they would chastise you for hailing on 69…Oh BTW, the CG is not perfect! Very good, but they are not perfect.
the one
smoking a cigarette while boarding my sailboat with a leaking gas tank 32 years ago wasn’t too sharp.
I think they probably did it, because of
2 reasons.
The first is I had 2 or three unsuccessful attempts at contacting the missing group. I think the CG might have been trying to politely tell me that I’d have better luck trying to find someone on 16.
The 2nd reason, is that the local CG is used to seeing us on the water and hearing us call on 16 and then switch to another channel. Perhaps they thought I didn’t know what frequency I was on while hailing.
Of course this was on the West Coast and we usually do use 16 for hailing.
I say
kudos to you for agreeing on a channel to meet on. 
If the person was giving you a polite hint, great, however, they should not be monitoring, much less talking, on 69. They’ve got a job to do and it’s -not- on 69.